First day back at RC!! I was last at RC in Summer 2013, over 8 years ago. I might want to ruminate on that some more later, but not now.

Today I met a bunch of people, did onboarding, met my RC onboarding buddy, and started some organizing work for working through The Little Book of Semaphores with a small crew.

In the afternoon, I set up some computing infrastructure stuff, including this blog! Hello world! Pretty delighted at how seamlessly project pages works with Github Pages–even the HTTPS was setup automatically.

I’ll be doing RC on a Linux laptop that I haven’t used much, so there’s a ton of tiny dev environment details to figure out, on top of everything else. Today’s biggest nuisance (delight??) I ran into was setting up libsecret to store my GitHub personal access token in. After my initial setup, all my git commands would just hang forever. I delightedly used strace and diagnosed that well, ok, I probably didn’t need to use strace to see that it was hanging on reading the credentials. Frustratedly fussed with chmod and reinstalling, until I found this helpful StackOverflow comment’s comment and restarted my computer, and all was well. I suspect that since I was already using the Gnome keyring, I needed to kick it somehow after setting up libsecret, which restarting did for me. Would be curious to understand what actually happened though.

Project-wise I’m hoping to use three.js to build a sun mapper to visualize how the sun moves over the course of a day/year. I want to use this to help do garden planning :) so I’ll also need to figure out how to make a simple model of the houses in my neighborhood. Today I got started with some three.js tutorials and look! I made a cube and a DIRECTIONAL LIGHT that hits the CUBE. I’ll figure out how to deploy this tomorrow so I can share more than static images as I go.

moving cube with light